Wiki Maintenance
Those unfamiliar with Wikia may find it intimidating to create a wiki page for their characters or to even edit the wiki. Written here are tutorials in Wikia's most used or useful functions. Creating an Infobox #Go to . If you want to make an infobox on another Wikia, just append "Special:InfoboxBuilder" to the URL where the page name would go (so it would be NAME.wikia.com/wiki/Special:InfoboxBuilder). #Customize your new infobox by clicking the list on the right to add in rows, categories, images, or titles. #Clicking an element in the main part of the editor lets you edit it, like changing a row name or altering if a category is collapsible or not. Clicking an element also brings up a delete icon if you need to. #You can drag elements in an infobox to reorder tham any way you'd like. #Give your infobox a unique, preferably descriptive name by clicking the upper left part of the corner where it says "Untitled infobox template" or by clicking Publish (where it will prompt you for a name). For infoboxes on the Chrono Stars Wiki, you are requested to follow the basic format of GalaxyInfoboxType, such as EaldremenCharBox, EaldremenRaceBox, etc. This makes it easy to organize templates based on what setting they are part of. #Once your infobox is published, you can use it in pages. Making a Page Note: The following information assumes the user is using the "Classic Rich-Text" editor. Instructions on how to do things such as change font size, add in templates, etc, will be slightly or greatly different depending on what editor you are using. If you have a Wiki account, you can change what editor you use by default on the Special:Preferences page. Create Your Page In the upper-right corner of every page is a button that says "Contribute". Select "Add A Page". The page's title should be unique and clearly point to what the article is about, such as using a character's full name (if known) as opposed to just their first name -- for example, titling a page "Aricrauer Velkt" instead of just "Aricrauer" will go a long way in keeping everything organized. This is especially important with names or terms that are either common enough (like "human") or general enough (like "the empire") that another setting might have something similar or want to use that term. Even if humans are simply called humans and the empire is simply known as just that in your setting, name your article something like Human (Galaxy) and give your empire a specific name to differentiate it from others. Select "Create Blank Page" after you type in the title of the page. You'll be taken to a blank editor, allowing us to go to the next part. Introduction Paragraph Typically, if you're going to be making a long article, such as a race information page or a character page, it's good to start off with an introduction. Another good thing to do with your introduction is to have internal links to other articles to give a sense of where the article's subject fits into the greater scope of the world. : Born to royalty and called by a distant star, '''Dokani the Necromancers future held great promise; her stark white hair and eyes indicated an unusual potential for necromancy, a rare gift even among the most prestigious of mages in the kingdom of Ores. It was thought that, even though her brother would be the one to take the throne, Dokani would someday bring about a new age of prosperity to Ores. In time, however, she aspired for nothing less than its downfall and complete ruin. : The long-lost ancestors of the modern races of Ealdremen, the '''precursors' long stood shrouded in myth. Their home planet of Mioura was shattered in the Godbomb and took with it the vast majority of the already sparse ruins and records left behind; even before then, by the time the precursors' distant descendants returned to Mioura, the planet was desolate and devoid of life, harried at every turn by undead and animated stone sentinels. Several hundred years later, as the gods of Ealdremen began to stir, more became known about these enigmatic people and their connection to a lost star in the sky called al-Kaniali, and it soon became clear that this supposedly extinct race was linked to Ealdremen's future more than initially believed. '' This overview is normally two or three sentences long. Think of it as the blurb that comes before the table of contents. Sections and Content Using the Heading 2 text will give you the massive section breaks with the underlines. Heading 3 is smaller and lacks the line break, and it makes it part of the preceding Heading 2 in the table of contents. You cannot make a table of contents yourself; when the wiki detects four or more heading sections, it'll automatically create a table of contents section that links to the headings. The content of the article can be as specific or elaborate as you want, but try to ensure that articles don't overstay their welcome and become too specific for what might be an article about an overview of the subject. An easy example is a race article; someone who wants to know the basics of what that race is and its place in the world probably won't need to know statistical breakdowns of their exact population throughout the world and how those populations have changed over time, with specific numbers and analyses. That information could certainly be fun to have, especially for people who are well-used to the world, but it may be better to branch off such specific information into a sub-article. Sub-Article By appending a backslash and text to an article's URL, or naming a page Existing Article/Subarticle, you can create a sub-article. For example, a page exclusively about the sociology of the precursor race would be Precursor/Subspecies, or a history article about the Alamo Empire would be Alamo Empire/History. A sub-article can be useful for a variety of reasons; most handily, they automatically link back to the parent article at the top of the sub-article's page. Parent articles don't automatically link to their sub-articles on the main page; as such, you'll have to link to them yourself in the body text of the main article, such as text like this located underneath a given heading or relevant section: :: Main article: Human/Subspecies It's good to italicize these and indent them (by using the functions on the top of the text editor or appending a colon or two in source editor mode) to differentiate them from the rest of the article and keep it looking nice and clean. On a sub-article page, you can go much more in-depth about a subject without bogging down a main page with information that, while potentially useful, is not necessary for a new reader. Inserting Images By clicking on the "Photo" button under "Add features and media" on the right of the text editor, you can insert a photo wherever the text editor cursor is currently located. If you have an image not yet uploaded to the wiki, you can do so here, or you can find the image you want and search for it and then click on it to put it on the page. From here, you can edit the size of the image on your page and give it a caption if you desire. If you put the image in the wrong place by accident, you can click and drag it somewhere else on the page to move its location. You can also edit an image (such as changing its size or caption from what you originally set it as) or remove it by mousing over it and selecting the corresponding option. Infobox The little boxes on the sides of the pages are called "infoboxes". They display quick information about the article that may not be easily incorporated into the main text of an article, such as a character's birthday, or a race's general average height and weight. The brand new shiny infobox is called "EaldremenCharBox". Please use it for Ealdremen characters. I worked very hard on it. You are welcome to use it or any other Ealdremen settings as a base for infoboxes in other settings. To insert an infobox, you can click the "Infobox" button on the right side of the page, and then click the one you want to use. If the infobox isn't where you wanted it to be, you can click it and drag it in the editor (or copy and paste it before the text you want it to appear alongside in source text editor) to reposition it. When editing your infobox, there's a few things of note. If you want to link to another page in the infobox, put the thing you're trying to link in double brackets. For example, trying to link to Thorn the Courtyard-Keeper's article would be [ the Courtyard-Keeper ], but without the spaces between the brackets. If you want to link to an article and have the link be something other than the article name, put a | after the article you're linking to. For example, [ the Courtyard-Keeper|Thorn ] would appear as Thorn. If you want to add an image to your infobox, you must type in Imagename.extension in the image field, such as "Sjoraheadshot.png" or "Aricrauernew.jpg". Unlike the old infobox, you do not need to append "File:" to the start. If you have nothing to add in a given infobox field, you can ignore it, and the infobox will not display that field at all on your page. Categories On the side of the page is a section for picking what categories to add the page to. You can also retroactively add categories to a page without opening the editor by scrolling to the very bottom and clicking "Add Categories". Try to keep your page organized according to existing pages on the wiki and keep them specific without being overly broad or niche, such as Ealdremen Player Characters rather than just using Characters, but not creating a new category like something like Ealdremen Player Characters Who Are Also Shape-Shifters With Guns. Generally speaking, every category should have its setting name appended to it to ensure that there's no cross-contamination between setting category pages. Then you're done! Now you have a wiki page to edit as much as you want! Editing Pages To edit a page, simply go to "Edit Page" on a wiki article from its dropdown list beneath the title, and you'll be brought to the now-familiar text editor to make modifications to the page. If you only want to edit a certain section of an article, sections with headers have an "Edit" button next to them. Some pages are unable to be edited except by the administrators of this wiki, such as the home page and particular setting pages. This is functioning as intended, and if you need to make an edit to such a page for whatever reason, such as noticing a typo or outdated/incorrect information, contact one of the people with an administrator account (which, as of now, is only User:Rotus). Please do not make big edits to the articles of other player characters or anything "belonging" to them (such as backstory NPCs) without their permission, as it can be very disrespectful very quickly. Also do not make such edits to setting pages, especially those that are created by other players. Old Versions of Articles Wikia automatically saves every version of an article that is ever saved, no matter how small the edit was. You can access a page's history by selecting "History" from the same dropdown list you can select "Edit" from. On the History page, you can rollback to a previous version of a page (they're catalogued by date and also show previews of the edits made on that date) or undo an edit if you made a big mistake somewhere in the current version of the page and don't know how to fix it. Uploading Images (without editing an article) Whether it's because you drew your character, got someone else to draw your character, or otherwise found an image you want to use on the wiki, you may find yourself in need of uploading an image. With the way Wikia works, we upload images here rather than linking them from an outside source. To upload an image, you need a Wikia account. Should you not want to make a Wikia account for whatever reason, have someone who does have a Wikia account upload the image for you. If you're uploading an image yourself, you go to the "Contribute" button as though you were making a page, but select "Add a Photo" instead. From here, you can upload an image to the wiki from your computer. When choosing a destination filename, make sure it's one that's both unique and also not too difficult to input on pages. For example, "shapeshifter.png" isn't a good name for a picture of a specific shape-shifter character -- it's better to upload it with the character's name. Images like tumblr_2h4s898fd.png may also prove troublesome to add to pages, so the image should be renamed to something better. After you upload an image to the wiki, it's there to be used as you please. Should you need to replace that image with another one, such as fixing a mistake in the original image, you can upload the picture again with the same name, and the wiki will replace it with the new one. However, when doing this, be mindful that the wiki's cache can take up to a day to "catch up" to the new version of the image you linked. While the direct URL for the image will show the new image, the old image may appear on some pages until later. When uploading images, please be courteous to the original creator of the image and add them to the Credits page. Category:Meta